The title is clearly an exaggeration but nonetheless a warning. As we recently showed, under Citrix’ regime, Xen(Source) grew closer to Microsoft and it’s gradually losing its GNU/Linux focus and excluding/neglecting all those other than Novell and Microsoft [1, 2, 3]. The following new article, “Citrix CTO Mum on Plans to Build on Microsoft’s Hyper-V”, quotes what used to be a main man of Xen.

Simon Crosby, the CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, can’t wait for Hyper-V to arrive. “The sooner that happens, the better,” he said.

Just like it has done in the past with server-based computing, Citrix will extend the Microsoft platform to make it more attractive, according to Crosby, without elaborating on what the company is working on. “We haven’t made any product announcements yet, but we will as Microsoft goes to market,” he said.

He also sees opportunities for Citrix running its products on top of Microsoft’s Hyper-V, for example, the recently launched XenDesktop.

This has been an interesting story of vendor capture, which we have been watching for almost a year. In essence, Microsoft used its close partners at Citrix to ‘steal’ software that was very important for GNU/Linux. That’s just why we keep an eye on projects like Blender. Xen is, in many ways, manipulated in the same way as Novell gets exploited. Money buys defections.

The criminal enterprise known as Microsoft finds itself embarrassingly exposed in the courtroom, for the IRS belatedly (decades too late) targets the company in an effort to tackle massive tax evasions

A look at some of last week's patent news, with imperative responses that criticise corporate exploitation of patents for protectionism (excluding and/or driving away the competition using legal threats)

Vista 10 to bring new ways for spies (and other crackers) to remotely access people's computers and remotely modify the binary files on them (via Windows Update, which for most people cannot be disabled)